The news is announced today that a music ensemble is to be invited to take up residence in Galway for a period of three years. This is likely to be no hardship to the ensemble in question - while finding a rich enough diet of classical music may involve train journeys, the city has its compensations (though you'd have to say they won't be much available to any musician on the lower end of the pay scale, at €25,000). And the newly resident ensemble may create a whole new climate for classical music
The Arts Council, NUI and TG4 have come together to fund the initiative, and it is being managed by Music for Galway. Advertisements are about to placed in the international media to attract the ensemble. It may have from three to five members and can involve any combination of instruments.
A shortlist of applicants will be invited to visit Galway for performances, workshops, interviews - and presumably, a recce as well - in June and July and the ensemble will be in residence by the autumn.
The première, in a rehearsed reading, of the newly discovered play by Myles na gCopaleen, An Scian, takes place in the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on Easter Sunday. A surreal piece about skulduggery among warring factions of the Irish- language movement in the 1940s, it had never been alluded to in any bibliographies of his work. The poet, Louis de Paor, was therefore astonished to come upon it in the Flann O'Brien archive in Boston College.
This is just one event in a week-long Irish-language extravaganza which takes place in Galway from March 26th. You feel Myles would have approved of events like 'Boogaloo' at the Black Box (the 'Dubhlann') with Cian Ó Ciabháin and Rónán Mac Aodh Bhuí, and Aingilín, a play written and directed by Dutchman Alex Hijmans, who has only been in Ireland a few years and performed in his Dominick Street café, Bananaphoblacht. You definitely feel he would have approved of Martin McDonagh's madcap tragi-comedy, The Lonesome West, particularly the religious figurine-melting episode, and particularly as the translation into Irish was done by Míchéal Ó Conghaile.
Other events include a co-production by the Abbey and Taibhdhearc of Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille, adapted for the stage by Macdara Ó Fátharta, with an impressive cast. Diarmuid de Faoite's one-man show on Pádraic Ó Conaire, a sean-nós concert featuring children from different Gaeltachts, sean-nós dancing and Liam Ó Maonlaí in concert are among the other events.
For information, phone 091-569777 or call in person at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway.
From Monday, the Association of Professional Dancers in Ireland (APDI) will have a true home again. Scattered between different venues since it lost the Meeting House Lane venue off Capel Street, it has now taken out a lease on the ground floor of the Theatre Space@The Mint. The snooker hall, which lent such seedy charm to the old Project@The Mint, is no longer there.
The APDI's classes will take place there in two studios, and its information desk and libraries of books, magazines and videos will all be there.
It's an interim measure, because the APDI is waiting to move into the new dance centre that is being developed on the corner of Corporation Street and Foley Street in north Dublin. However, Emma Richardson laughs when asked when that development might be finished, saying: "Two years' time, to be honest with you."
The APDI can be contacted on 01-4781130.
